Elections Before 2000

Upton Sinclair. [Source: NNDB (.com)]Upton Sinclair, the author of Urban Jungle and a well-known “muckraking” journalist, runs as a Democratic candidate for governor of California. Sinclair has previously run failed campaigns for political office as a Socialist. He runs on a platform of eliminating poverty in California. To beat him back, the California Republican Party hires an ad agency and the first political consulting firm in the country, Whitaker and Baxter. The consulting firm decides that the best way to beat Sinclair is to portray him as a crazed Bolshevik—a “Red.” The firm produces phony newsreels of staged events, and pays for them to be shown at movie houses throughout California. One newsreel depicts crowds of bedraggled hoboes leaping off of a freight train, and one hobo telling the camera, “Sinclair says he’ll take the property of the working people and give it to us.” Another ad depicts an actor with a heavy beard and a thick Russian accent explaining why he will vote for Sinclair: “His system worked well in Russia, so why can’t it work here?” Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM and a powerful California Republican, ensures that the newsreels get near-saturation coverage throughout the state. Sinclair is defeated. In 1990, media pundit Roger Simon will write, “Though more than a half-century has passed, the fundamentals of that first negative video commercial are the same that are used in negative TV ads today: fear, danger, and stereotyping of the enemy.” [Regardie's Magazine, 10/1/1990]

President Harry Truman triumphantly displays a newspaper headline declaring victory for his opponent, Thomas Dewey. Dewey lost the election. [Source: Electoral-Vote (.com)]Advertising executive Thomas Rosser Reeves Jr. approaches Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey and offers to produce television ads for the Dewey campaign. Dewey is even with Democratic incumbent Harry Truman in the polls. “This could be a close election,” Reeves says. “I can pretty much tell which states are going to be close. If you would start two or three weeks before Election Day and saturate those critical states with spots, it could swing the election.” Reeves may be aware of the powerful impact negative newsreels had on the 1934 California gubernatorial election (see 1934). Dewey refuses, saying, “I don’t think it would be dignified.” Dewey subsequently loses one of the closest presidential elections in US history. In 1990, media pundit Roger Simon will write: “In 1948 there were fewer than 500,000 TV sets in America. Four years later there were nearly 19 million. And nobody ever said no to television again.” [Regardie's Magazine, 10/1/1990]

Roger Ailes (left) and Richard Nixon in a 1968 photo. [Source: White House Photo Office / Rolling Stone]Roger Ailes, the media consultant for the Richard Nixon presidential campaign, decides that Nixon should, during a televised town hall, take a staged question from a “good, mean, Wallaceite cab driver.” Ailes is referring to the overtly racist third-party candidacy of Governor George Wallace (D-AL). Ailes suggests “[s]ome guy to sit there and say, ‘Awright, Mac, what about these n_ggers?’” According to Nixonland author Rick Pearlstein, the idea is to have Nixon “abhor the uncivility of the words, while endorsing a ‘moderate’ version of the opinion.” [Pearlstein, 5/2008, pp. 331; Media Matters, 7/22/2011] The suggestion is not used. Ailes will go on to found Fox News (see October 7, 1996).

New York Times headline for Nixon election victory. [Source: New York University]Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon defeats Democratic challenger Hubert H. Humphrey in one of the closest elections in modern history. The election is too close to call for hours, until Illinois’s 26 electoral votes finally go to Nixon. The Illinois decision prevents third-party contender George C. Wallace from using his 15 electoral votes to determine the winner; the contest could well have ended up being determined in the House of Representatives. Instead, Nixon wins with 290 electoral votes, 20 more than he needs. Humphrey wins 203. Democrats retain control of both the House and Senate. [Washington Post, 11/5/1968]

Life Magazine cover featuring Agnew. [Source: Southern Methodist University]Vice President Spiro Agnew, fresh from helping Richard Nixon win the 1968 election by viciously attacking their Democratic opponents, wins a reputation as a tough-talking, intensely negative public presence in Washington. Much of Agnew’s tirades are crafted by White House speechwriters Pat Buchanan and William Safire. In 1969, Agnew derides antiwar protesters, saying, “A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” [Time, 9/30/1996] Student war protesters “have never done a productive thing in their lives,” and, “They take their tactics from Fidel Castro and their money from daddy.” [Chicago Sun-Times, 10/11/1998] In 1970, he attacks the American media and critics of the Nixon administration alike, telling a San Diego audience that “we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.” Agnew attacks enemies of the administration as “pusillanimous pussyfooters,” “vicars of vacillation,” and “the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Democrats are “radic-libs” and “ideological eunuchs.” In Des Moines, reading a speech written by Buchanan, Agnew slams the US media industry, saying it is dominated by a “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.” Agnew’s unrelenting attacks on the press raise, reporter Lance Morrow writes in 1996, “issues of media bias, arrogance and unaccountability that are still banging around in the American mind.” Agnew is undone by his own negativity, earning a barrage of critical press coverage for, among other things, calling an Asian-American reporter a “fat Jap,” referring to a group of Polish-Americans as “Polacks,” and dismissing the plight of America’s poor by saying, “To some extent, if you’ve seen one city slum, you’ve seen them all.” Many political observers feel that Agnew’s heated rhetoric is the precursor to the wave of personal, negative attack politics practiced by the GOP in the decades to come. [New York Times, 9/19/1996; Time, 9/30/1996] Interestingly, while many Americans celebrate Agnew’s rhetoric, few want him as a successor to the presidency. One Baltimore bar patron says, “I don’t want the president of the United States to sound like I do after I’ve had a few beers.” [Economist, 9/28/1996]

1972 Nixon campaign button. [Source: Terry Ashe / Getty Images]Ten days into his administration, Richard Nixon meets with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and two other aides, Frederick LaRue and John Sears. The topic of discussion is Nixon’s re-election in 1972. Nixon wants to have a campaign committee for his re-election set up outside the Republican National Committee, and with separate, independent financing. He also authorizes continuous, year-round polling. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 34]

White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman begins setting up a secret campaign fund for the 1970 and 1972 elections. The source of the funding is to be, in its initial phases, money from billionaire oilman J. Paul Getty. Haldeman writes to fellow Nixon aide John Ehrlichman: “Bebe Rebozo [Nixon’s close friend] has been asked by the president to contact J. Paul Getty in London regarding major contributions.… The funds should go to some entity other than the [Republican] National Committee so that we retain full control of their use.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 40]

President Nixon orders chief of staff H. R. Haldeman to finalize the creation of a second secret campaign fund (see February 17, 1969). The purpose of this particular fund is to support candidates in the November 1970 midterm elections that Nixon believes are loyal to him. The idea is not necessarily to support Republicans, but to support Nixon loyalists—party is a secondary consideration. “One of our most important projects for 1970 is to see that our major contributors funnel all their funds through us,” Nixon writes. “[W]e can see that they are not wasted in overheads or siphoned off by some possible venal types on the campaign committees… we can also see that they are used more effectively than would be the case if the candidates receive them directly.” The candidates’ fund, eventually dubbed the “Townhouse Operation” or “Town House Project” (so named because all of its dealings must take place in private offices and not in the White House or any campaign offices (see Early 1970)), is to be operated by Haldeman, Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans (himself a veteran campaign fund-raiser), Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC)‘s aide Harry Dent, and Dent’s assistant John Gleason. The list of contributors includes Chicago insurance tycoon W. Clement Stone, PepsiCo’s Donald Kendall, and Texas electronics millionaire H. Ross Perot. “Townhouse” is not the only secret campaign fund run from the White House; another is run by Nixon’s close friend millionaire Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, and features $50,000 secretly flown to Nixon’s beach home in Key Biscayne, Florida by an employee of billionaire Howard Hughes. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 153]

President Richard Nixon writes an action memo to senior aide H. R. Haldeman saying, “One of our most important projects for 1970 is to see that our major contributors funnel all their funds through us.” Haldeman and Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans set up a secret fund-raising enterprise, the “Townhouse Operation,” designed to bypass the Republican National Committee. By doing so, Nixon intends to ensure the GOP will field candidates suitably loyal to him, and reliably opposed to the GOP’s traditional Eastern Establishment base that Nixon so resents. Although George H. W. Bush is a charter member of that Eastern Establishment, Nixon likes and trusts him. Bush is “a total Nixon man,” Nixon once says. “He’ll do anything for the cause.” Bush is the main beneficiary of the slush fund, which is made up of about $106,000 in contributions from Texas GOP sources, but up to 18 other Republican Senate candidates also receive money from the fund. The Wall Street Journal will later lambast Townhouse, calling it a “dress rehearsal for the campaign finance abuses of Watergate, as well as for today’s loophole-ridden system.” [Werth, 2006, pp. 115-116]

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [Source: Bettmann / Corbis]President Nixon, deep in planning for his 1972 re-election campaign, issues several orders regarding the campaign’s approach towards African-American voters. He notes in the margin of a news story about some blacks possibly supporting his re-election, “Be sure our [public relations] types make it clear we aren’t adopting policy for the promise of being 100% Negro and winning their vote—We know this is not possible.” Beside a headline proclaiming that a court-ordered desegretation deadline will not be enforced, he writes, “Excellent job.” And on a news article about a proposal to make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday a national holiday, he writes: “No! Never!” He tells his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, “That would be like making Nero Christ.” He does learn of one idea for mobilizing black voters that he likes. He reads of the formation of a black-led political party in Alabama that will siphon votes from Democratic candidates, and memos Haldeman, “Get this subsidized now.” He underlines “now” twice. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 159]

Lawrence O’Brien. [Source: Public domain]President Nixon targets the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Lawrence O’Brien, for surveillance. Nixon worries about O’Brien, a canny political operative, and especially O’Brien’s ties to Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), whom he believes to be by far the biggest threat to his re-election, even after Kennedy’s involvement in the Chappaquiddick tragedy (see July 18, 1969). Nixon orders his Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman, to have veteran campaign operative Murray Chotiner (see 1950) put together an “Operation O’Brien” to discredit the chairman. “Start with his income tax returns,” Nixon orders. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 174-175]

George C. Wallace. [Source: Public domain]President Nixon is intent on knocking Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist Democrat, out of the 1972 elections. To that end, he has his personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, ferry $100,000 in secret campaign funds (see December 1, 1969) to Alabama gubernatorial candidate Albert Brewer. Kalmbach delivers the money in the lobby of a New York City hotel, using the pseudonym “Mr. Jensen of Detroit.” Through his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Nixon also orders an IRS investigation of Wallace. White House aide Murray Chotiner delivers the information gleaned from the IRS probe to investigative columnist Jack Anderson, who subsequently prints the information in his syndicated columns. When Brewer forces a runoff with Wallace in the May 5 primary elections, Kalmbach has another $330,000 delivered to Brewer’s campaign. Brewer’s aide Jim Bob Solomon takes the money, in $100 bills, to Brewer via a flight from Los Angeles to Alabama; Solomon is so worried about the money being discovered in the event of a plane crash that he pins a note to his underwear saying that the money is not his, and he is delivering it on behalf of the president. Wallace, calling Brewer “the candidate of 300,000 n_ggers,” wins the runoff despite the massive cash infusions from the White House. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 228-229]

Frederick LaRue. [Source: Spartacus Educational]Two White House aides, Frederick LaRue and G. Gordon Liddy, attend a meeting of the Nixon presidential campaign, the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), where it is agreed that the organization will spend $250,000 to conduct an “intelligence gathering” operation against the Democratic Party for the upcoming elections. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] The members decide, among other things, to plant electronic surveillance devices in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters (see April-June 1972). LaRue is a veteran of the 1968 Nixon campaign (see November 5, 1968), as is Liddy, a former FBI agent. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007; Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] LaRue decides to pay the proposed “Special Investigations Unit,” later informally called the “Plumbers” (see Late June-July 1971), large amounts of “hush money” to keep them quiet. He tasks former New York City policeman Tony Ulasewicz with arranging the payments. LaRue later informs another Nixon aide, Hugh Sloan, that LaRue is prepared to commit perjury if necessary to protect the operation. A 1973 New York Times article will call LaRue “an elusive, anonymous, secret operator at the highest levels of the shattered Nixon power structure.” [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] The FBI will later determine that this decision took place between March 20 and 30, 1972, not 1971 (see March 20-30, 1972). In this case, the FBI timeline is almost certainly in error, since the “Plumbers” break-in of the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist came well before this date (see September 9, 1971).

Nixon at AMPI rally and convention, September 3, 1971 [Source: George Mason University]President Nixon meets with members of a farmer’s cooperative, Associated Milk Producers, Inc (AMPI). Nixon and his staff members have secretly colluded with AMPI members to artificially drive up the price of milk in return for $2 million in campaign contributions for Nixon’s 1972 re-election. (Ironically, in 1968, AMPI had supported Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, but they now want access to Nixon, and retained former Nixon aide Murray Chotiner as soon as Chotiner left the White House.) In 1969 and 1970, AMPI officials delivered $235,000 to Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, for use in the Townhouse Project (see Early 1970) and other secret campaign operations. AMPI officials agree to government subsidies that will drive the price of milk up to $4.92 per hundredweight after politely listening to Nixon’s ideas of marketing milk as a sedative: “If you get people thinking that a glass of milk is going to make them sleep, I mean, it’ll do just as well as a sleeping pill. It’s all in the head.” Nixon heads off specific discussions of how AMPI money will be delivered, warning: “Don’t say that while I’m sitting here. Matter of fact, the room’s not tapped. Forgot to do that” (see February 1971). After the meeting, Nixon’s aides calculate that the deal will cost the government about $100 million. White House aide John Ehrlichman says as he leaves Nixon’s office: “Better get a glass of milk. Drink it while it’s cheap.” That evening, Chotiner and the president of AMPI, Harold Nelson, transfer the $2 million to Kalmbach in a Washington hotel room. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 309]

Herbert L. “Bart” Porter (see Fall 1970 - Early 1971) is promoted from his post on the White House’s Communications Directorate to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), as director of scheduling. Porter later writes: “By the time I was transferred… I had a headful of palace gossip. I thought in terms of we and they, and I could chant, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’ with the best of Orwell’s little pigs. (But I can’t believe that in this respect things were too different in the camp of the Democrats.)” Aside from his usual duties of scheduling various campaign representatives and spokespersons to speak on behalf of President Nixon, Porter is put in charge of CREEP’s petty-cash safe and the job of paying out moneys to individuals. He will later comment, “I’ll never know why I was asked to do this, but I think this is what caused all of my troubles.” [Harper's, 10/1974]

International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) offers the Nixon administration $400,000 to finance the GOP’s 1972 national convention in San Diego. [The People's Almanac, 1981] President Nixon wanted San Diego as the site of the convention, but the San Diego city government has no intention of spending lavish amounts of money subsidizing a convention it does not need. The ITT contribution, privately arranged by White House and GOP officials, is key to having San Diego as the site of the convention. In early July, the Republican National Committee announces San Diego as the convention site; eight days later, the Justice Department announces that it is dropping its antitrust suit against ITT (see July 31, 1971). Shortly thereafter, Richard McLaren, the head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and an enthusiastic trustbuster whose atypical decision to let ITT off the hook confuses many observers, abruptly quits the department; within days, McLaren lands a federal judgeship without benefit of Senate hearings. Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson believes the whole deal is fishy, and will write a December 9, 1971 column to that effect, but he will not learn the entire truth behind the GOP-ITT deal until months later (see February 22, 1972). [Anderson, 1999, pp. 194-200]

President Nixon tells his aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman that they will need to dun even more money out of International Telephone and Telegraph, one of his re-election campaign’s largest and most secretive donors (see 1969). ITT is embroiled in an antitrust lawsuit, and Nixon is working to get the suit settled in favor of ITT in return for secret campaign donations (see July 31, 1971). Nixon says that Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst “has the ITT thing settled,” adding, “He cut a deal with ITT.” Nixon also orders that the Justice Department antitrust lawyer who is pursuing the prosecution of ITT, Richard McLaren, be given his marching orders: “I want something clearly understood, and, if it’s not understood, McLaren’s ass is to be out of there within one hour. The ITT thing—stay the hell out of it. Is that clear? That’s an order.… I do not want McLaren to run around prosecuting people. raising hell about conglomerates, stirring things up… I don’t like the son of a b_tch.” McLaren will later drop the prosecution in return for a federal judgeship (see May-July 1971). [Reeves, 2001, pp. 324]

Donald Segretti. [Source: Spartacus Educational]Three attorneys—one the assistant attorney general of Tennessee, Alex Shipley—are asked to work as so-called “agent provocateur” for the Campaign to Re-elect the President (CREEP), an organization working to re-elect President Nixon (see October 10, 1972). The three tell their story to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein in late September 1972, and Bernstein’s colleague Bob Woodward learns more from his FBI source, “Deep Throat,” days later (see October 7, 1972 and October 9, 1972). They all say they were asked to work to undermine the primary campaigns of Democratic presidential candidates by the same man, Donald Segretti, a former Treasury Department lawyer who lives in California. Segretti will later be identified as a CREEP official. Segretti, the attorneys will say, promises them “big jobs” in Washington after Nixon’s re-election (see November 7, 1972). All three says they rejected Segretti’s offers (see June 27-October 23, 1971). Segretti himself will deny the allegations, calling them “ridiculous.” Part of a Larger Pattern? - Bernstein and Woodward connect the Segretti story to other Nixon campaign “dirty tricks” they are already aware of, including efforts by Watergate burglar James McCord (see June 19, 1972) to “investigate” reporter Jack Anderson, attempts by Watergate surveillance man Alfred Baldwin (see June 17, 1972) to infiltrate Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s successful attempts to electronically “bug” Democratic campaign headquarters (see May 27-28, 1972) and his investigation of Democratic presidential candidate Edward Kennedy (see June 19, 1972), and McCord’s rental of an office next to the offices of Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. To the reporters, the Segretti story opens up speculation that the Nixon campaign had undertaken political espionage efforts long before the Watergate burglary. In their book All the President’s Men, Bernstein and Woodward write, “Watergate could have been scheduled before the president’s re-election chances looked so good and perhaps someone had neglected to pull the plug.” Bernstein has heard of CIA operations such as this mounted against foreign governments, called “black operations,” but sometimes more colloquially called “mindf_cking.” [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 114-115]Segretti a 'Small Fish in a Big Pond' - An FBI official investigating CREEP’s illegal activities will call Segretti “a small fish in a big pond,” and will say that at least 50 undercover Nixon operatives have worked around the country to disrupt and spy on Democratic campaigns. The political intelligence and sabotage operation is called the “offensive security” program both by White House and CREEP officials. FBI investigators will find that many of the acts of political espionage and sabotage conducted by Segretti and his colleagues are traced to this “offensive security” program, which was conceived and directed in the White House and by senior CREEP officials, and funded by the secret “slush fund” directed by CREEP finance manager Maurice Stans (see September 29, 1972). FBI officials will refuse to directly discuss Segretti’s actions, saying that he is part of the Watergate investigation (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972), but one FBI official angrily calls Segretti’s actions “indescribable.” White House Connections Confirmed - In mid-October 1972, the Washington Post will identify Dwight Chapin, President Nixon’s appointments secretary, as the person who hired Segretti and received reports of his campaign activities. Segretti’s other contact is Hunt. Segretti also received at least $35,000 in pay for his activities by Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach. [Washington Post, 1/31/1973]

Donald Segretti. [Source: Bettmann / Corbis]One of the Nixon campaign’s “agents provocateur,” California lawyer Donald Segretti, attempts to recruit three former colleagues to work with him in disrupting and interfering with Democratic campaign events. Segretti met the three, Alex Shipley, Roger Lee Nixt, and Kenneth Griffiths, while all three served as captains in the Army’s Judge Advocate General Corps during the Vietnam War. Shipley, now an assistant attorney general in Tennessee, later recalls (see October 7, 1972) that according to Segretti, “Money would be no problem, but the people we would be working for wanted results for the cash that would be spent.” Segretti tells the three that they will need false identification papers and fake names, asks Shipley to recruit five more people for the job, and says their primary task will be to disrupt the campaign schedules of Democratic candidates and obtain information from their campaign organizations. Shipley will recall that Segretti tells him not to reveal the names of the five operatives he recruits, not even to Segretti; in return, Segretti can never tell Shipley where the money to fund the operations is coming from. According to Shipley: “I said, ‘How in hell are we going to be taken care of if no one knows what we’re doing?’ and Segretti said: ‘Nixon knows that something is being done. It’s a typical deal.’ Segretti said, ‘Don’t-tell-me-anything-and-I-won’t-know.’” Working for Nixon, Pretending to Work for Democrats - Segretti gives Shipley an example of what he might do as a campaign operative: “He [Segretti] said: ‘For instance, we’ll go to a [Democratic presidential candidate Edward] Kennedy rally and find an ardent Kennedy worker. Then you say that you’re a Kennedy man too but you’re working behind the scenes; you get them to help you. You send them to work for [Democratic presidential candidate Edmund] Muskie, stuffing envelopes or whatever, and you get them to pass you the information. They’ll think that they are helping Kennedy against Muskie. But actually you’re using the information for something else.’ It was very strange.… I said, ‘Well, who will we be working for?’ He said, ‘Nixon’ and I was really taken aback, because all the actions he had talked about would have taken place in the Democratic primaries. He said the main purpose was that the Democrats have an ability to get back together after a knockdown, drag-out campaign. What we want to do is wreak enough havoc so they can’t.” Turned Down - Shipley, Nixt and Griffiths all turn Segretti down; a fourth ex-JAG lawyer, Peter Dixon, will later confirm that he, too, turned down Segretti, but before Segretti could reveal any details to him. Shipley is so concerned that he asks a friend who worked for Senator Albert Gore (D-TN) what to do, and the friend advises him to “string [Segretti] along to see what he’s up to.” At a subsequent meeting, Segretti tells Shipley that he is recruiting lawyers because he doesn’t want to break any laws, and says that the emphasis of the operations is to “have fun” as opposed to committing blatant criminal acts. [Washington Post, 10/10/1972] Some of the “fun” activities include waving signs at rallies such as “If you like Hitler, you’ll love Wallace. Vote Muskie!” Perhaps the most well-known trick is the airplane hired to fly over the Democratic National Convention in Miami (see July 13, 1972) trailing the banner, “Peace Pot Promiscuity—Vote McGovern.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 531] Segretti’s last attempt to recruit Shipley is October 23, 1971. Segretti Always 'Well-Financed' and at Centers of Campaign Activity - Shipley will recall that “the one important thing that struck me was that he seemed to be well-financed. He was always flying across the country. When he came to Washington in June he said he had an appointment at the Treasury Department and that the Treasury Department was picking up the tab on this—his plane and hotel bill.” Segretti later tells Shipley that “it wasn’t the Treasury Department that had paid the bill, it was the Nixon people. [Segretti] said, ‘Don’t ask me any names.’” According to travel documents, Segretti flies to, among other places, Miami; Houston; Manchester, New Hampshire; Knoxville; Los Angeles; New York City; Washington; Salt Lake City; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Albuquerque; Tucson; San Francisco; and several other California cities. FBI investigations will find that the most concentrated areas of Nixon campaign undercover activity are in Illinois, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, California, Texas, Florida, and Washington, DC. [Washington Post, 10/10/1972]

The first African-American candidate to successfully run for office in Leon County, Florida, is James Ford, a vice principal running for the Tallahassee city commission. The Tallahassee Democrat gives a qualified endorsement to Ford, saying that he is a “mature Negro” and going on to say: “We are impressed that he may be the best-qualified Negro ever to offer for public office in Tallahassee. We would expect him to serve, if elected, as a proper representative of his racial minority without antagonistic attitudes towards the majority that might result in more frustration and discord than genuine advancement.” [Tapper, 3/2001]

Jack Caulfield’s White House ID card. [Source: Watergate.com]A staff aide to President Nixon, former New York City police detective Jack Caulfield, develops a broad plan for launching an intelligence operation against the Democrats for the 1972 re-election campaign, “Operation Sandwedge.” The original proposal, as Caulfield will later recall, is a 12-page document detailing what would be required to create an “accurate, intelligence-assessment capability” against not just the Democrats but “also to ensure that the then powerful anti-war movement did not destroy Nixon’s public campaign, as had been done to Hubert Humphrey in 1968” (see November 5, 1968). Sandwedge is created in anticipation of the Democrats mounting their own political espionage efforts, which Caulfield and other Nixon aides believe will use a private investigations firm, Intertel, headed by former Justice Department officials loyal to former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Caulfield will later recall, “Intertel represented, in my opinion, the potential for both formidable and sophisticated intelligence opposition tactics in that upcoming election campaign.” Sandwedge is turned down by senior White House aides in favor of the “Special Investigation Unit” (see March 20, 1971 and September 29, 1972) headed by G. Gordon Liddy. Caulfield resigns from the White House shortly thereafter. He will later call the decision not to implement “Sandwedge” a “monumental” error that “rapidly created the catastrophic path leading directly to the Watergate complex—and the president’s eventual resignation.” Caulfield has little faith in Liddy, considering him an amateurish blowhard with no real experience in intelligence or security matters; when White House counsel John Dean asks him for his assessment of Liddy’s ability to run such an operation, he snaps, “John, you g_ddamn well better have him closely supervised” and walks out of Dean’s office. Caulfield later writes, “I, therefore, unequivocally contend that had there been ‘Sandwedge’ there would have been no Liddy, no Hunt, no McCord, no Cubans (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972) and, critically, since I had personally decided to negate, while still on the White House staff, a developing intelligence interest by Dean in the Watergate’s Democratic National Committee offices, seven months prior to the break-in! NO WATERGATE!” [John J. 'Jack' Caulfield, 2006; Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007]

In a secretly recorded conversation in the Oval Office, President Nixon makes the following comments about Jewish contributors to the Democratic Party: “Please get the names of the Jews. You know, the big Jewish contributors to the Democrats. Could you please investigate some of the [expletive deleted].” The next day, Nixon continues the conversation, asking his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman: “What about the rich Jews? The IRS is full of Jews, Bob.” Haldeman replies, “What we ought to do is get a zealot who dislikes those people.” Nixon concurs: “Go after them like a son of a b_tch.” Nixon also reacts positively to Haldeman’s idea of the Republicans secretly funding a black independent presidential candidate in 1972 to siphon off Democratic votes: “Put that down for discussion—not for discussion, for action.” [PBS, 1/2/1997]

Shirley Chisholm. [Source: Ted Streshinsky / Corbis]President Nixon and his aides discuss several ways to split the Democrats in 1972. One is to secretly pump $5 million of Republican money into the prospective presidential campaign of antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy. Another is to secretly finance an African-American presidential candidate. Some of the names bandied about are civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (D-NY), Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes, and Georgia state legislator Julian Bond. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 370-371] Chisholm will run an unsuccessful campaign for president in 1972 [Jo Freeman, 2/2005] , but it is not known whether her campaign receives any money from Republicans as Nixon suggests.

Edmund Muskie. [Source: Bettmann / Corbis]Less than two weeks before the New Hampshire presidential primary, the Manchester Union-Leader publishes a letter to the editor alleging that leading Democratic candidate and Maine senator Edmund Muskie approved a racial slur of Americans of French-Canadian descent (an important voting bloc in New Hampshire), and notes: “We have always known that Senator Muskie was a hypocrite. But we never expected to have it so clearly revealed as in this letter sent to us from Florida.” The crudely written letter becomes widely known as the “Canuck letter.” The next day, the paper’s publisher, William Loeb, publishes an attack on Muskie’s wife. An angry Muskie denounces the letter and the editorial, calling Loeb a “gutless coward,” and in the process apparently bursts into tears. The media focuses on Muskie’s tears, and the “weakness” it implies. As a result, Muskie’s standing in the polls begins to slip, and when votes are cast in New Hampshire, Muskie receives only 48% of the vote, far less than predicted. The letter is later found to have been a “dirty trick” of the Nixon campaign committee (see October 10, 1972), with White House communications official Ken Clawson admitting to actually writing the letter (see October 10, 1972). [Washington Post, 10/10/1972; Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007]View from 1987 - In 1987, David Broder, the author of the Washington Post story on the incident, recalls: “In retrospect, though, there were a few problems with the Muskie story. First, it is unclear whether Muskie did cry.… Melting snow from his hatless head filled his eyes, he said, and made him wipe his face… the senator believes that he was damaged more by the press and television coverage of the event than by his own actions… it is now clear that the incident should have been placed in a different context: Muskie was victimized by the classic dirty trick that had been engineered by agents of the distant and detached President Nixon. The Loeb editorial that had brought Muskie out in the snowstorm had been based on a letter forged by a White House staff member intent on destroying Muskie’s credibility. But we didn’t know that and we didn’t work hard enough to find out.… Had those facts been known, I might have described Muskie in different terms: not as a victim of his over-ambitious campaign strategy and his too-human temperament, but as the victim of a fraud, managed by operatives of a frightened and unscrupulous president. That story surely would have had a different impact…. Unwittingly, I did my part in the work of the Nixon operatives in helping destroy the credibility of the Muskie candidacy.” Media Expectations - Broder will admit that the story falls neatly into a storyline many in the media want to report: “the unraveling of a presidential front-runner’s campaign.” Muskie has shown frequent bouts of anger; according to Broder, many reporters are just waiting for something to trigger Muskie into an outburst that will damage his candidacy. For himself, Muskie will describe his emotional reaction: “I was just g_ddamned mad and choked up over my anger.… [I]t was a bad scene, whatever it was.” [Washington Monthly, 2/1987]

Maurice Stans. [Source: Southern Methodist University]In a last campaign fundraising swing before April 7, when the new campaign finance laws go into effect, Maurice Stans, the financial chief for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), launches a final fundraising swing across the Southwest on behalf of Richard Nixon. Stans solicits contributions from Republicans and Democrats alike, and tells reluctant contributors that if they do not want their donations traced back to them, their anonymity can be ensured by moving their contributions through Mexican banks. Mexico does not allow the US to subpoena its bank records. Laundering - “It’s called ‘laundering,’” Miami investigator Martin Dardis later tells Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein on August 26, 1972. “You set up a money chain that makes it impossible to trace the source. The Mafia does it all the time. So does Nixon.… This guy Stans set up the whole thing. It was Stans’s idea.… Stans didn’t want any way they could trace where the money was coming from.” The same money-laundering system allows CREEP to receive illegal contributions from corporations, which are forbidden by law to contribute to political campaigns. Business executives, labor leaders, special-interest groups, even Las Vegas casinos can donate through the system. Stans uses a bank in Mexico City, the Banco Internacional; lawyer Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre handles the transactions. Stans keeps the only records. Confirmed by Lawyer - Lawyer Robert Haynes confirms the setup for Bernstein, and says breezily: “Sh_t, Stans has been running this operation for years with Nixon. Nothing really wrong with it. That’s how you give your tithe.” Haynes calls the fundraising trip “Stans’s shakedown cruise.” Stans uses a combination of promises of easy access to the White House and veiled threats of government retaliation to squeeze huge donations out of various executives; Haynes says: “If a guy pleaded broke, [Stans] would get him to turn over stock in his company or some other stock. He was talking 10 percent, saying it was worth 10 percent of some big businessman’s income to keep Richard Nixon in Washington and be able to stay in touch.” Haynes represents Robert Allen, who runs the Nixon campaign’s Texas branch; Allen is merely a conduit for the illegal campaign monies. It is from the Banco Internacional account that Watergate burglar Bernard Barker is paid $89,000 (see April-June 1972) and the “Dahlberg check” of $25,000 (see August 1-2, 1972). [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 54-56]

Arthur Bremer being restrained after shooting George Wallace. [Source: Kansas City Star]Around 4 p.m, gunman Arthur Bremer shoots Alabama Governor George Wallace in a Maryland shopping center. Wallace, mounting a third-party bid for the presidency, survives the shooting, but is crippled for life. He is also essentially out of the race. The political ramifications are powerful: Wallace, a segregationist Democrat, is doing well in many Southern states. With Wallace out of the picture, his voters will almost uniformly go to Richard Nixon, and whatever threadbare chance of victory Democratic candidate George McGovern has of defeating Nixon is over. Lone Gunman - There is no evidence to connect Nixon or the GOP with Bremer—all evidence will show that Bremer is a classic “lone gunman” who stalked several presidential candidates before gunning down Wallace—but Nixon and his campaign officials know that even a hint of a connection between the Nixon campaign and Bremer would be politically devastating. Break-in - On the night of the shooting, Nixon aide Charles Colson orders campaign operative E. Howard Hunt (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972) to break into Bremer’s Milwaukee apartment to discover if Bremer had any political connections (hopefully Democratic or liberal connections, though none are ascertained). [Woodward, 2005, pp. 47-50] Interestingly, by 6:30 p.m., White House communications official Ken Clawson calls the Washington Post to announce that “left-wing” literature had been found in Bremer’s apartment, and that Bremer may have been associated with the presidential campaign of George McGovern. No such evidence is found. Colson tells reporters that Bremer is a dues-paying member of the Young Democrats of Milwaukee, a lie that makes it into several newspapers. Post editor Howard Simons will consider the idea that Wallace was assassinated on the orders of the White House—“the ultimate dirty trick”—but no evidence of that connection ever surfaces. [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 326; Reeves, 2001, pp. 480]FBI Leaves Apartment - Hunt will claim in his autobiography, Undercover, that he refused the order to burglarize Bremer’s apartment. The FBI finds both left-wing and right-wing literature in Bremer’s apartment, as well as a diary whose opening line is, “Now I start my diary of my personal plot to kill by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace.” Local reporters will later claim that the FBI leaves Bremer’s apartment for about 90 minutes, during which time reporters and other unidentified figures are able to spirit away papers and other materials. It is not clear whether Hunt is one of those “unidentified figures.” [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007]Deep Throat - Top FBI official W. Mark Felt provides useful information for Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s profile of Bremer, operating as a “deep background” source. It is the first time Felt, who will become Woodward’s “Deep Throat” Watergate source (see May 31, 2005), gives important information to Woodward. [Woodward, 2005, pp. 47-50]

Frank Sturgis, one of the Watergate burglars. [Source: Bettmann / Corbis]A covert unit of President Nixon’s “Plumbers” installs surveillance equipment in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate hotel and office complex. The Washington police report an attempt to unscrew a lock on the door of the Committee’s office between 11 p.m. and 8 a.m., but do not know as yet who tried to force the lock. Some of the five men caught burglarizing the same offices six weeks later (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972) are currently registered at the Watergate Hotel, according to subsequent police investigations. [Washington Post, 6/18/1972; Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, 7/3/2007]Change of Plans - According to one of the burglary team (see April-June 1972), Eugenio Martinez, the original plan centers on a fake “banquet” in the Watergate hotel for their fake company, the Ameritus Corporation, to be held in a private dining room that has access to the elevators. While team leader and White House aide E. Howard Hunt hosts the banquet, Martinez and the other burglars will use the elevator to go to the DNC offices and “complete the mission.” Virgilio Gonzalez, a locksmith, will open the door; Frank Sturgis, Reinaldo Pico, and Felipe de Diego will act as lookouts; Bernard Barker will get the documents; Martinez will take photographs; and James McCord will “do his job,” apparently involving electronics that Martinez does not understand. First Time Failure - Apparently they do not follow their plan. Instead, Hunt and the seven members of what Martinez calls “McCord’s army” enter the Watergate complex at midnight, and they enter and sign in under the eye of a policeman. McCord explains that they are all going to work at the Federal Reserve offices on the eighth floor, an explanation Martinez feels is shaky. They are unable to get in through the doors of the sixth floor, and are forced to cancel the operation. Martinez recalls that while the others attempt to get in to the sixth floor, McCord is busy doing something else on the eighth floor; at 2 a.m., he sees McCord on the eighth floor talking to two guards. What McCord is doing, Martinez does not know. “I did not ask questions, but I thought maybe McCord was working there,” he will later recall. “It was the only thing that made sense. He was the one who led us to the place and it would not have made sense for us to have rooms at the Watergate and go on this operation if there was not someone there on the inside.” Hunt is furious at the failure to get into the DNC offices, and reschedules the operation for the next night. Gonzales flies to Miami and brings back his entire set of lockpicking tools. Martinez questions the laxity of the plan—the lack of floor plans, information about the elevators, knowledge of the guards’ schedules, and no contingency plans for failure. Hunt tells him, through Barker: “You are an operative. Your mission is to do what you are told and not to ask questions.” Success - The second try is successful. Gonzalez and Sturgis get through the doors and usher everyone in, with one of them calling over their walkie-talkie, “The horse is in the house.” Martinez recalls taking “thirty or forty” photographs of campaign contributor documents, and McCord plants three phone taps, telling the others that while the first two might be discovered, the third will not. They return to their hotel rooms about 5 a.m. [Harper's, 10/1974]

Frank Wills, the security guard who discovers the taped doors and alerts the DC police. [Source: Bettmann / Corbis]Five burglars (see June 17, 1972) are arrested at 2:30 a.m. while breaking in to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Headquarters offices in Washington’s Watergate hotel and office complex; the DNC occupies the entire sixth floor. [Washington Post, 6/18/1972; Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, 7/3/2007]Discovery - They are surprised at gunpoint by three plainclothes officers of the DC Metropolitan Police. Two ceiling panels have been removed from the secretary’s office, which is adjacent to that of DNC chairman Lawrence O’Brien. It is possible to place a surveillance device above those panels that could monitor O’Brien’s office. The five suspects, all wearing surgical gloves, have among them two sophisticated voice-activated surveillance devices that can monitor conversations and telephone calls alike; lock-picks, door jimmies, and an assortment of burglary tools; and $2,300 in cash, most of it in $100 bills in sequence. They also have a walkie-talkie, a shortwave receiver tuned to the police band, 40 rolls of unexposed film, two 35mm cameras, and three pen-sized tear gas guns. Near to where the men are captured is a file cabinet with two open drawers; a DNC source speculates that the men might have been preparing to photograph the contents of the file drawers. Guard Noticed Taped Door - The arrests take place after a Watergate security guard, Frank Wills, notices a door connecting a stairwell with the hotel’s basement garage has been taped so it will not lock; the guard removes the tape, but when he checks ten minutes later and finds the lock taped once again, the guard calls the police. The police find that all of the stairwell doors leading from the basement to the sixth floor have been similarly taped to prevent them from locking. The door leading from the stairwell to the DNC offices had been jimmied. During a search of the offices, one of the burglars leaps from behind a desk and surrenders. [Washington Post, 6/18/1972] The FBI agents responding to the burglary are initially told that the burglars may have been attempting to plant a bomb in the offices. The “bomb” turns out to be surveillance equipment. [O.T. Jacobson, 7/5/1974 ]Last Mission for Martinez - One of the burglars, Cuban emigre and CIA agent Eugenio Martinez, will recall the burglary. They have already successfully burglarized a psychiatrist’s office in search of incriminating material on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg (see September 9, 1971), and successfully bugged the DNC offices less than a month previously (see May 27-28, 1972), but Martinez is increasingly ill at ease over the poor planning and amateurish behavior of his colleagues (see Mid-June 1972). This will be his last operation, he has decided. Team leader E. Howard Hunt, whom Martinez calls by his old code name “Eduardo,” is obviously intrigued by the material secured from the previous burglary, and wants to go through the offices a second time to find more. Martinez is dismayed to find that Hunt has two operations planned for the evening, one for the DNC and one for the campaign offices of Democratic candidate George McGovern. Former CIA agent and current Nixon campaign security official James McCord (see June 19, 1972), the electronics expert of the team, is equally uncomfortable with the rushed, almost impromptu plan. Hunt takes all of the burglars’ identification and puts it in a briefcase. He gives another burglar, Frank Sturgis, his phony “Edward J. Hamilton” ID from his CIA days, and gives each burglar $200 in cash to bribe their way out of trouble. Interestingly, Hunt tells the burglars to keep the keys to their hotel rooms. Martinez later writes: “I don’t know why. Even today, I don’t know. Remember, I was told in advance not to ask about those things.” Taping the Doors - McCord goes into the Watergage office complex, signs in, and begins taping the doors to the stairwells from the eighth floor all the way to the garage. After waiting for everyone to leave the offices, the team prepares to enter. Gonzalez and Sturgis note that the tape to the basement garage has been removed. Martinez believes the operation will be aborted, but McCord disagrees; he convinces Hunt and the other team leader, White House aide G. Gordon Liddy, to continue. It is McCord’s responsibility to remove the tape once the burglars are inside, but he fails to do so. The team is well into the DNC offices when the police burst in. “There was no way out,” Martinez will recall. “We were caught.” Barker is able to surreptitiously advise Hunt, who is still in the hotel, that they have been discovered. Martinez will later wonder if the entire second burglary might have been “a set-up or something like that because it was so easy the first time. We all had that feeling.” The police quickly find the burglars’ hotel keys and then the briefcase containing their identification. As they are being arrested, McCord, who rarely speaks and then not above a whisper, takes charge of the situation. He orders everyone to keep their mouths shut. “Don’t give your names,” he warns. “Nothing. I know people. Don’t worry, someone will come and everything will be all right. This thing will be solved.” [Harper's, 10/1974; Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/7/2007]'Third-Rate Burglary' - White House press secretary Ron Ziegler will respond to allegations that the White House and the Nixon presidential campaign might have been involved in the Watergate burglary by calling it a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and warning that “certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.” [Washington Post, 5/1/1973] The Washington Post chooses, for the moment, to cover it as a local burglary and nothing more; managing editor Howard Simons says that it could be nothing more than a crime committed by “crazy Cubans.” [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 19]CIA Operation? - In the weeks and months to come, speculation will arise as to the role of the CIA in the burglary. The Nixon White House will attempt to pin the blame for the Watergate conspiracy on the CIA, an attempt forestalled by McCord (see March 19-23, 1973). In a 1974 book on his involvement in the conspiracy, McCord will write: “The Watergate operation was not a CIA operation. The Cubans may have been misled by others into believing that it was a CIA operation. I know for a fact that it was not.” Another author, Carl Oglesby, will claim otherwise, saying that the burglary is a CIA plot against Nixon. Former CIA officer Miles Copeland will claim that McCord led the burglars into a trap. Journalist Andrew St. George will claim that CIA Director Richard Helms knew of the break-in before it occurred, a viewpoint supported by Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon campaign director John Mitchell, who will tell St. George that McCord is a “double agent” whose deliberate blunders led to the arrest of the burglars. No solid evidence of CIA involvement in the Watergate conspiracy has so far been revealed. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007]

The US media initially pays little attention to the Watergate burglary (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972). Most political reporting is focused on ridiculing Democrat George McGovern’s chances of becoming president. Time prints a five-page report on McGovern’s campaign proposals, and offers its sardonic vision of America under McGovern: “The neighborhood draft dodger has triumphantly returned home to take one of the new jobs at Freedom Fleet, a bus company shuttling ghetto children to racially balanced schools in the suburbs. After work, the ex-expatriate picks up his date at the corner abortion parlor, stops next door at Pot City for some Acapulco Gold, and then trips off to Timothy Leary’s Dizzyland, a new chain of rock-‘n’-roll-your-own nightclubs springing up in abandoned American Legion halls.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 502-503]

In an early-morning meeting between Nixon campaign director John Mitchell and White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, the three agree that their first priority in the aftermath of the Watergate burglary (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972) is to protect President Nixon. To that end, the Watergate investigations must be stopped before they lead to other unsavory political operations—campaign “horrors,” Mitchell calls them. PR 'Counter-Attack' Discussed - Later this morning, Nixon and Haldeman discuss the need to keep the FBI’s Watergate investigation on a tight leash. They discuss “counter-attack” and “public relations” offensives to distract the media by attacking the Democrats. The White House needs a “PR offensive to top” Watergate, they say, and they “need to be on the attack—for diversion.” One suggestion is to dismiss the burglary as nothing but a prank. Most White House staffers, including Haldeman, seem to believe that fellow aide Charles Colson concocted the idea of the burglary; Haldeman says that Colson does not seem to know “specifically that this was underway. He seems to take all the blame himself.” Nixon replies, “Good.” Nixon worries that his secret taping system (see February 1971 and July 13-16, 1973) “complicates things all over.” Nixon closes the conversation by saying: “My God, the [Democratic National C]ommittee isn’t worth bugging, in my opinion. That’s my public line.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 503-505; Reston, 2007, pp. 33]Nixon, Colson Plan Delays - Later the same day, Nixon meets with senior aide Charles Colson. Several items from the conversation are damning in their specificity. Nixon tells Colson in regard of the Watergate burglary (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972), “If we didn’t know better, we would have thought it was deliberately botched.” This statement shows that Nixon has some detailed knowledge of the burglary, contrary to his later claims. Colson later says: “Bob [Haldeman] is pulling it all together. Thus far, I think we’ve done the right things.” Colson could well be referring to the White House’s attempts to distance itself from the break-in. Nixon says, referring to the burglars, “Basically, they are pretty hard-line guys,” and Colson interrupts, “You mean Hunt?” referring to the burglars’ leader, E. Howard Hunt. Nixon replies: “Of course, we are just going to leave this where it is, with the Cubans.… At time, uh, I just stonewall it.” Nixon then says, regarding the future of the Watergate investigation: “Oh sure, you know who the hell is going to keep it alive. We’re gonna have a court case and indeed… the difficulty we’ll have ahead, we have got to have lawyers smart enough to have our people delay, avoiding depositions, of course.” [Reston, 2007, pp. 46-47]

Thomas Eagleton. [Source: Wally McNamee / Corbis]Democratic vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton withdraws from the campaign. A week before, anonymous (actually Nixon campaign) sources leaked information to the press about Eagleton’s history of “nervous exhaustion” and “depression.” Between 1960 and 1966, Eagleton had been hospitalized three times, and had twice undergone electroshock therapy. Eagleton acknowledges that he lied to McGovern aides about his medical history when they asked him about any potential skeletons in his closet. Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern says that although he knew nothing about Eagleton’s medical history, he would have chosen Eagleton as his running mate regardless. (“They nominated a crazy man!” former Treasury Secretary John Connally exclaims upon hearing the news.) After several leading Democrats turn down the position, McGovern finally lands a replacement running mate in former Peace Corps chief Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA). [Reeves, 2001, pp. 518-519]

President Nixon responds to the report by the General Accounting Office (GAO) alleging possible illegal campaign finances in his re-election campaign (see August 22, 1972). Nixon tells reporters, “[W]e have a new law here in which technical violations have occurred and are occurring, apparently on both sides.” When asked what illegalities the Democrats have committed, Nixon says: “I think that will come out in the balance of this week. I will let the political people talk about, but I understand that there have been [violations] on both sides.” The financial director of his re-election campaign, Maurice Stans (see Before April 7, 1972), is an honest man, Nixon says, and is currently investigating the matter “very, very thoroughly, because he doesn’t want any evidence at all to be outstanding, indicating that we have not complied with the law.” Between the GAO’s and the FBI’s investigations, Stans’s own internal investigation, and an internal White House investigation by White House counsel John Dean, Nixon says there is no need for a special Watergate prosecutor, as some have requested. Of the Dean investigation: “I can say categorically that his investigation indicates that no one on the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident [the Watergate burglary—see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972]. What really hurts in matters of this sort is not the fact that they occur, because overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong. What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.” [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 57; Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, 7/3/2007] A Washington Post story on the press conference highlights Nixon’s use of the phrase “presently employed,” and notes that several people suspected of campaign wrongdoing—G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, Maurice Stans, Hugh Sloan, and John Mitchell—no longer work for the administration. [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 57] An assistant attorney general is convinced that the Dean investigation is “a fraud, a pipeline to [White House aide H. R.] Haldeman.” [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 206] In April 1973, an associate of Dean tells Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that there was never any such investigation, that Dean had not even discussed anything to do with Watergate as of August 29. “There never was a report,” the associate says. “Dean was asked to gather certain facts. The facts got twisted around to help some other people above him.” [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 297-298] Dean later tells Watergate investigators that he never conducted any such internal White House investigation (see June 3, 1973). [Washington Post, 6/3/1973]

Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman orders the White House files to be culled and the most sensitive, and potentially embarrassing, documents removed. Designated “White House Special Files,” these are to be destroyed if President Nixon loses the election (see November 7, 1972). They will not actually be destroyed; eventually they will be seized by the FBI as part of its Watergate probe. Historian Richard Reeves will write, “Many White House papers were destroyed or disappeared during the Watergate investigations, but much more survived for history than Richard Nixon ever intended.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 17]

New York Times headline announcing Nixon victory. [Source: New York Times]Richard Nixon defeats Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in the largest landslide in modern electoral history. Nixon wins over 60 percent of the votes and 49 of the 50 states. [Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, 7/3/2007] Democrats retain control of the House and Senate. Nixon’s victory breaches traditional Democratic strongholds in the Northeast, and his “Southern strategy” creates a “Solid South” of Republican support. Harry Dent, a White House aide involved in the “Southern strategy” of targeting conservative Democrats who once supported segregationist candidate George Wallace (see May 15, 1972), says, “[T]he Southern strategy is working—in fact, it’s working all over the country.” Democrats, on the other hard, were sharply divided throughout the campaign, with many traditional Democratically aligned organizations such as trade unions refusing to back the McGovern candidacy, problems with finding and keeping a suitable vice-presidential running mate, and McGovern surviving a challenge to his primary victory at the Democratic convention. [Washington Post, 11/8/1972] The simmering Watergate investigations apparently have little drag on the Nixon re-election efforts.

President Nixon and senior aide Charles Colson discuss the Watergate trial just underway (see January 8-11, 1973). Nixon has apparently just learned that someone in his re-election campaign planted electronic surveillance on Gary Hart, Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s campaign manager. Nixon tells Colson: “I understand [chief of staff H. R.] Haldeman is after some kid that bugged Gary Hart.… But how could that be? Watergate came before McGovern got off the ground, and I don’t know why the hell we bugged McGovern.” Colson replies: “Remember. That was after the California primary” (where McGovern clinched the nomination). Nixon grouses: “That’s the thing about all of this. We didn’t get a g_ddamn thing from any of it that I can see.” Colson disagrees: “Well, frankly, we did, but then, what they mainly used, we know.” Later in the conversation, Nixon brings up the problem of Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, who has what Nixon calls a “sensitive position” in the Watergate investigation—Hunt knows enough to blow the lid off the entire conspiracy, and has threatened to reveal it if he is not paid (see Mid-November, 1972). Colson says: “The others [the other six defendants] will just tell the truth and prove their case. But there is one advantage to it. There’ll be a hell of a lot of stuff that’ll come out.… Some counts will be dropped against Hunt. There will be appeals pending in the other cases.” Nixon adds, “As long as this trial is going on, the Congress will keep its g_ddamn, cotton-pickin’ hands off that trial.” Colson is sure the Senate Watergate Committee (see February 7, 1973) will begin immunizing witnesses to testify. Using the CIA Connection - As the conversation moves on, Colson agrees with Nixon that he thought the Democrats might drop their interest in the burglary after the election, especially since “I think they figured that these were all guys who were CIA.… And they were all taking orders from people… acting on behalf of John Mitchell [the former head of Nixon’s re-election campaign].” Nixon says that it should be a simple thing to grant Hunt executive clemency, considering Hunt’s wife is dead and he has a child with permanent brain damage suffered in an automobile accident. “We’ll build that son of a b_tch up like nobody’s business. We’ll have Buckley write a column and say that he should have clemency, if you’ve given 18 years of service.” Colson adds that Buckley “served under Hunt in the CIA.” (Conservative columnist William F. Buckley became a CIA agent in 1951, and worked under Hunt in Mexico City.) Abandoning Five of the Burglars - The five Cuban burglars, Colson says, are irrelevant. They “didn’t have any direct information.… I don’t give a damn if they spend five years in jail…. They can’t hurt us.… Hunt and [G. Gordon] Liddy: direct meetings and discussions are very incriminating to us.” Colson is not worried so much about Liddy, saying: “Apparently he’s one of those masochists. He enjoys punishing himself. That’s okay, as long as he remains stable. I mean, he’s tough…. [Hunt and Liddy are] both good, healthy, right-wing exuberants.” Nixon says wearily, “This… is the last damn fifty miles.” [Reston, 2007, pp. 191-195]

Conservative Christian activist Paul Weyrich, who helped found the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), tells a group of evangelical Christians that he does not want all Americans to vote. “Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome—good government,” Weyrich says. “They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Weyrich is referring to the power of conservative Christians, a minority voting bloc which generally votes Republican, being diluted at the polls when more Americans vote. [Crooks and Liars, 6/6/2007; Rolling Stone, 8/30/2011]

Robert Sensi’s membership card in Republicans Abroad. [Source: Larry J. Kolb]According to a later account by Robert Sensi, a young CIA agent with excellent contacts among prominent Arabs, the Republican National Committee opens what Sensi calls “a secret channel to Iran.” Sensi is not only alluding to the secret plans for the US to sells arms to Iran, which is just developing (see Early 1980), but to the “October Surprise” of the November 1980 US presidential elections (see October 1980). Sensi will bring the matter up to author and fellow CIA agent Larry Kolb in a Washington, DC, hotel bar in 1986, but will not go into detail. Sensi will note that CIA Director William Casey has been involved in the US’s secret dealings with Iran since the outset, as has Robert Carter, the deputy director of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. Sensi will say that Casey, Carter, and the other participants are using the overseas political organization Republicans Abroad as cover for more covert activities. The organization is “a great drawing card,” according to Sensi, who is a member. “It gives us access to embassies and a lot of people we would have had a hard time getting to without the cachet of representing the ruling party in the United States.” Writing in 2007, Kolb will reflect on the Republican Party’s “own in-house team of covert operatives, as capable of conducting espionage and sabotage for the Republican Party as for the CIA. It seemed the Republicans were still doing what they had been caught doing during Watergate. Spying on and sabotaging the Democrats. Ratf_cking, as the Republican operatives called it (see October 7, 1972). Coming just a few years after the Watergate national Passion Play and all it had put our country through, this seemed flagrant and foul, like sleaze squared. And like politics-as-usual.” [Kolb, 2007, pp. 28-29]

Billy Carter. [Source: Bettmann / Corbis]An Italian-American disinformation campaign has a profound effect on the US presidential election of 1980. With the assistance of Italian intelligence (SISMI) and the shadowy right-wing organization called “Propaganda Due,” or P-2 (see 1981), American neoconservative Michael Ledeen organizes a smear campaign against Billy Carter, the brother of US President Jimmy Carter. (Billy Carter is a self-proclaimed alcoholic whose escapades have provoked much hilarity among the US press and an equal amount of embarrassment in the White House.) In the weeks before the election, Ledeen publishes articles in the British and American press accusing Billy Carter of having untoward and perhaps illegal financial dealings with Libyan dictator Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi. Billy Carter is forced to admit that he did accept a $200,000 loan from al-Qadhafi’s regime. The ensuing scandal becomes known as “Billygate.” It is not known for sure what impact the scandal will eventually have on the race between President Carter and his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan; what is known is that “Billygate” erupted in 1979, was investigated, and had died down. Then, less than a month before the November 1980 election, Ledeen and Arnaud de Borchgrave write an article for the US’s New Republic and Britain’s Now magazine that falsely alleges Billy Carter took an additional $50,000 from al-Qadhafi, and worse, met secretly with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The articles reignite the scandal in time to affect the election. In 1985, a Wall Street Journal investigation will find that “Billygate” is an orchestrated attempt by Ledeen and SISMI to throw the election to Reagan. Ledeen, who used SISMI sources to unearth financial information on Billy Carter, was himself paid $120,000 by SISMI for “Billygate” and other projects. Ledeen has a code name, Z-3, and is paid through a Bermuda bank account. Ledeen will later admit that his consulting firm, ISI, may have accepted SISMI money, and will claim he can’t remember if he has a coded identity. P-2 operative Francesco Pazienza will be convicted in absentia on multiple charges stemming from the “Billygate” disinformation campaign, including extortion and fraud. Ledeen will not be charged in the Italian court that convicts Pazienza, but prosecutors will cite his participation in their arguments against Pazienza. Ledeen will deny any involvement with either Pazienza or P-2, and deny any connection to any disinformation schemes. In fact, Ledeen will say he doesn’t even believe P-2 exists. After Reagan takes office, Ledeen will be made a special assistant to chief of staff Alexander Haig, and later will become a staff member of Reagan’s National Security Council, where he will play a key role in setting up the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. [Unger, 2007, pp. 233-234, 388]

The anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) issues a series of “voter guides” just before Election Day. The pamphlets are later credited as helping persuade voters to cast their ballots for presidential candidate Ronald Reagan (R-CA) and a number of Republican Senate candidates. In 2012, reporter Jeffrey Toobin will characterize them as “barely concealed works of advocacy,” a form of “electioneering” that federal law bans groups such as NRLC from issuing this close to an election. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) later tries to challenge the pamphlet distribution, and the NRLC wins a First Amendment challenge in court under the legal leadership of general counsel James Bopp Jr. As a result of the court case, Bopp becomes interested in challenging campaign finance restrictions (see January 10-16, 2008) as well as abortion rights. [New Yorker, 5/21/2012]

Lee Atwater. [Source: NNDB (.com)]Republican political strategist Lee Atwater, in a discussion with political science professor Alexander Lamis, discusses the Republican strategy of using racism to win elections. Lamis will later quote Atwater in his book Southern Politics in the 1990s. Atwater takes Lamis through the evolution of Republican appeals to racism: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N_gger, n_gger, n_gger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n_gger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N_gger, n_gger.’” Atwater will go on to manage the 1988 presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush, where he will oversee the use of what is considered one of the most overtly racist campaign ads in modern history, the “Willie Horton” ad (see September 21 - October 4, 1988). [New York Times, 10/6/2005]

Ronald and Nancy Reagan celebrate winning the presidency. [Source: Medal of Freedom (.com)]After winning a sweeping election victory against President Jimmy Carter in November 1980, Ronald Reagan is sworn in as US president. The same day that Reagan is sworn in, Iran releases the remaining 52 hostages it has held captive at the US Embassy in Tehran for 444 days (see November 4, 1979-January 20, 1981). [PBS, 2000]

An unusual relationship forms between the virulently anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas (see November 27, 1955 and After), and the political organization of Senator Al Gore (D-TN). In 1988, WBC head Fred Phelps provides rooms in his compound for Gore’s presidential campaign workers. In 1993, Phelps’s oldest son Fred Phelps Jr. is invited to the first Clinton-Gore inauguration. But by 1998, Gore is seen as such an enemy by the WBC that its members picket the funeral of his father. [Southern Poverty Law Center, 4/2001] In 2000, Phelps Senior will say that the relationship between himself and Gore is “not what it used to be,” but he will say that he still receives Christmas cards from Gore. Phelps will attempt to explain the relationship between Gore and the WBC, saying: “He was strong pro-life, and he said he wasn’t going to accept any money from homosexual groups, and things of that nature. But there’s no question in my mind that approximately in the late 1980s or the early 1990s he made a conscious decision that he wanted to be a successful national candidate, and he sold out on some of those critical social issues, because that’s what he had to do to succeed nationally in the Democratic Party.” [Topeka Capital-Journal, 11/4/2000]

Dan Rather interviews Vice President Bush, watching him on a monitor. Neither Rather nor the CBS viewers can see Bush’s consultant Roger Ailes off-camera. [Source: Media Research Center]Roger Ailes, a former media consultant to the Nixon administration (see Summer 1970), comes up with a bold plan to help his new client, Vice President George H.W. Bush, who is running for president. Bush is neck-deep in the Iran-Contra scandal (see Before July 28, 1986, August 6, 1987, and December 25, 1992) and, as reporter Tim Dickinson will later write, comes across as “effete” in comparison to his predecessor Ronald Reagan. Ailes decides to use an interview with combative CBS News reporter Dan Rather to bolster his client’s image. Ailes insists that the interview be done live, instead of in the usual format of being recorded and then edited for broadcast. Dickinson will later write, “That not only gave the confrontation the air of a prizefight—it enabled Ailes himself to sit just off-camera in Bush’s office, prompting his candidate with cue cards.” Rather is in the CBS studio in New York and has no idea Ailes is coaching Bush. As planned, Bush begins the interview aggressively, falsely accusing Rather of misleading him by focusing the interview on Iran-Contra. (It is true that CBS had not informed the Bush team that it would air a report on the Iran-Contra investigation as a lead-in to the Bush interview, a scheduling that some in the Bush team see as a “bait-and-switch.”) When Rather begins to press Bush, Ailes flashes a cue card: “walked off the air.” This is a set piece that Bush and Ailes have worked out beforehand, based on an embarrassing incident in Rather’s recent past, when Rather angrily walked off the CBS set after learning that his newscast had been pre-empted by a women’s tennis match. Clenching his fist, Ailes mouths at Bush: “Go! Go! Just kick his ass!” Bush fires his rejoinder: “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set?” In their 1989 book The Acting President: Ronald Reagan and the Supporting Players Who Helped Him Create the Illusion That Held America Spellbound, CBS host Bob Schieffer and co-author Gary Paul Gates will write: “What people in the bureau and viewers at home could not see was that the response had not been entirely spontaneous. As the interview progressed, the crafty Ailes had stationed himself beside the camera. If Bush seemed to be struggling for a response, Ailes would write out a key word in huge letters on his yellow legal pad and hold it just beneath the camera in Bush’s line of vision. Just before Bush had shouted that it was not fair to judge his career on Iran, Ailes had written out on his legal pad the words.… Three times during the interview, Bush’s answer had come after Ailes had prompted him with key words or phrases scribbled on the legal pad.” Dickinson will later write: “It was the mother of all false equivalencies: the fleeting petulance of a news anchor pitted against the high crimes of a sitting vice president. But it worked as TV.” Ailes’s colleague Roger Stone, who worked with Ailes on the 1968 Nixon campaign, will later say of the interview: “That bite of Bush telling Rather off played over and over and over again. It was a perfect example of [Ailes] understanding the news cycle, the dynamics of the situation, and the power of television.” [Associated Press, 7/6/1989; NewsBusters, 1/25/2008; Rolling Stone, 5/25/2011] After the interview is concluded, Bush leaps to his feet and, with the microphone still live, says: “The b_stard didn’t lay a glove on me.… Tell your g_ddamned network that if they want to talk to me to raise their hands at a press conference. No more Mr. Inside stuff after that.” The unexpected aggression from Bush helps solidify his standing with hardline Republicans. The interview gives more “proof” to those same hardliners that the media is hopelessly liberal, “their” candidates cannot expect to be treated fairly, and that the only way for them to “survive” encounters with mainstream media figures is through aggression and intimidation. [Salon, 1/26/2011] Conservative commentator Rich Noyes will write in 2008 that Bush’s jab at Rather exposed the reporter’s “liberal bias,” though he will fail to inform his readers of Ailes’s off-camera coaching. [NewsBusters, 1/25/2008]

The Bush presidential re-election campaign, trailing Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, in the polls, decides on a “two-track” campaign strategy. The strategy is crafted by campaign manager Lee Atwater. The “high road” track will be taken by President Bush and the campaign directly, attacking Dukakis’s record on law enforcement and challenging his reputation as having led Massachusetts into a period of economic growth (the so-called “Massachusetts Miracle”). The “low road,” designed by Atwater to appeal to the most crude racial stereotypes (see 1981), is to be taken by ostensibly “independent” voter outreach organizations. Because of a loophole in campaign finance rules, the Bush campaign could work closely with “outside groups” and funnel money from “independent” organizations to the outside groups, while denying any connections with those groups were they to run objectionable or negative political ads. Atwater wants to avoid a potential backlash among voters, who may turn against the campaign because of their antipathy towards “attack politics.” Atwater and his colleagues determine that the outside groups will use “brass knuckle” tactics to attack Dukakis, and because the ads come from these “independent” organizations, the Bush campaign can distance itself from the groups and even criticize them for being too negative. In 1999, InsidePolitics.org will write: “In so doing, Bush’s presidential effort would train a generation of campaign operatives how to run a negative campaign. Its ‘two-track’ approach would become a model of how to exploit campaign finance laws and use outside groups to deliver hard-hitting messages on behalf of the candidate. Over the course of the following decade, this strategy would become commonplace in American elections.” The idea of “outsourcing” attack ads had been popularized by the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign, which used what it called “independent expenditures” to finance “outside” attacks on its Democratic opponent, President Jimmy Carter. In 1988, “independent” conservative groups spend $13.7 million on the Bush campaign, most of which goes towards attacks on Dukakis. In comparison, progressive and liberal groups spend $2.8 million on behalf of Dukakis—an almost five-to-one discrepancy. Most of the outside money is spent on television advertising. InsidePolitics will write, “Increasingly, candidates were discovering, electoral agendas and voter impressions could be dominated through a clever combination of attack ads and favorable news coverage.” [Inside Politics (.org), 1999] The result of Atwater’s “two-track” strategy is the “Willie Horton” ad, which will become infamous both for its bluntly racist appeal and its effectiveness (see September 21 - October 4, 1988). An earlier “independent” ad attacking Dukakis’s environmental record provides something of a template for the Horton ad campaign. The so-called “Boston Harbor” ad, which depicted garbage floating in the body of water, challenged Dukakis’s positive reputation as a pro-environmental candndate. The ad helped bring Dukakis’s “positives” down, a strong plus for Bush, whose record as an oil-company executive and reputation as a powerful political friend to the oil companies hurts him in comparison with Dukakis. In July 1988, Readers Digest, a magazine known for its quietly conservative slant, publishes a profile of Horton titled “Getting Away With Murder.” The Bush campaign reprints the article and distributes it by the tens of thousands around the country. [Regardie's Magazine, 10/1/1990; Inside Politics (.org), 1999]

The image of Willie Horton as shown in the ‘Weekend Pass’ campaign ad. [Source: University of Virginia]A political advertisement on behalf of the George H. W. Bush presidential campaign appears, running on televisions around the country between September 21 and October 4, 1988. Called “Weekend Pass,” it depicts convicted murderer William “Willie” Horton, who was granted 10 separate furloughs from prison, and used the time from his last furlough to kidnap and rape a young woman. The advertisement and subsequent media barrage falsely accuses Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, of creating the “furlough program” that led to Horton’s release, and paints Dukakis as “soft on crime.” It will come to be known as one of the most overly racist political advertisements in the history of modern US presidential politics. Ad Content - The ad begins by comparing the positions of the two candidates on crime. It notes that Bush supports the death penalty for convicted murderers, whereas Dukakis does not. The ad’s voiceover narrator then states, “Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison,” with the accompanying text “Opposes Death Penalty, Allowed Murderers to Have Weekend Passes” superimposed on a photograph of Dukakis. The narrator then says, “One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times,” accompanied by a mug shot of Horton. The voiceover continues: “Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend.” At this point, the ad shows another picture of Horton being arrested while the accompanying text reads, “Kidnapping, Stabbing, Raping.” The ad’s narration concludes: “Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime.” The ad is credited to the “National Security Political Action Committee.” [Inside Politics (.org), 1999; Museum of the Moving Image, 2008; University of Virginia, Introduction to American Politics, 11/18/2009]'Soft on Crime' - The ad is a reflection of the measures the Bush campaign is willing to undertake to defeat the apparently strong Dukakis candidacy. Dukakis is a popular Democratic governor and widely credited with what pundits call the “Massachusetts Miracle,” reversing the downward economic spiral in his state without resorting to hefty tax increases. At the time of the ad, Dukakis enjoys a 17-point lead over Bush in the polls. Bush campaign strategists, led by campaign manager Lee Atwater, have learned from focus groups that conservative Democratic voters, which some call “Reagan Democrats,” are not solid in their support of Dukakis, and are swayed by reports that he vetoed legislation requiring teachers to say the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the school day. They also react negatively when they learn that during Dukakis’s tenure as governor, Horton had been furloughed and subsequently raped a white woman. Atwater and the Bush campaign decide that Dukakis can successfully be attacked as a “liberal” who is “not patriotic” and is “soft on crime.” Atwater, who has a strong record of appealing to racism in key voting groups (see 1981), tells Republican Party officials, “By the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name.” Although Dukakis had vetoed a bill mandating the death penalty for first-degree murder in Massachusetts, he did not institute the furlough program; that was signed into law by Republican governor Francis Sargent in 1972. The ads and the accompanying media blitz successfully avoid telling voters that Sargent, not Dukakis, instituted the furlough program. [Regardie's Magazine, 10/1/1990; Inside Politics (.org), 1999]Running the Horton Ad - The ad is sponsored by an ostensibly “independent” political organization, the conservative National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC), headed by former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Thomas Moorer. NSPAC’s daughter organization “Americans for Bush” actually put together the ad, created by marketer Larry McCarthy in close conjunction with Atwater and other Bush campaign aides; Atwater determined months before that the Horton ad should not come directly from the Bush campaign, but from an “independent” group supporting Bush, thus giving the Bush campaign the opportunity to distance itself from the ad, and even criticize it, should voters react negatively towards its message (see June-September 1988). The first version of the ad does not use the menacing mug shot of Horton, which McCarthy later says depicts “every suburban mother’s greatest fear.” McCarthy and Atwater feared that the networks would refuse to run the ad if it appeared controversial. However, the network censors do not object, so McCarthy quickly substitutes a second version of the ad featuring the mug shot. When Democrats and progressive critics of the Bush campaign complain that Bush is running a racist ad, Bush media adviser Roger Ailes says that neither he nor the campaign have any control over what outside groups like “Americans for Bush” put on the airwaves. InsidePolitics will later write, “This gave the Bush camp plausible deniability that helped its candidate avoid public condemnation for racist campaigning.” Accompanying Newspaper Reports, Bush Campaign Ads - The ad airs for the first time on September 21. On September 22, newspapers around the nation begin publishing articles telling the story of Angie and Clifford Barnes, victimized by Horton while on furlouogh. On October 5, the Bush campaign releases a “sister” television ad, called “Revolving Door.” Scripted by Ailes, the commercial does not mention Horton nor does it show the now-infamous mug shot, but emphasizes the contention that Dukakis is “soft on crime” and has what it calls a “lenient” furlough policy for violent convicts. The central image of the ad is a stream of African-American inmates moving slowly in and out of a revolving gate. The voiceover says that Dukakis had vetoed the death penalty and given furloughs to “first-degree murderers not eligible for parole. While out, many committed other crimes like kidnapping and rape.” At the same time, Clifford Barnes and the sister of the youth murdered by Horton embark on a nationwide speaking tour funded by a pro-Bush independent group known as the Committee for the Presidency. Barnes also appears on a number of television talk shows, including those hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera. Barnes and the victim’s sister also appear in two “victim” ads, where Barnes says: “Mike Dukakis and Willie Horton changed our lives forever.… We are worried people don’t know enough about Mike Dukakis.” In 1999, InsidePolitics will write that the media gives the “Revolving Door” ad a “courteous reception,” and focuses more on the two ads’ impact on the election, and the Dukakis campaign’s lack of response, instead of discussing the issues of race and crime as portrayed by the ads. It is not until October 24, less than two weeks before the election, that anyone in the mainstream media airs footage of critics questioning whether the ads are racially inflammatory, but these appearances are few and far between, and are always balanced with appearances by Bush supporters praising the campaign’s media strategy. [Inside Politics (.org), 1999; Inside Politics (.org), 1999; University of Virginia, Introduction to American Politics, 11/18/2009]Denials - Bush and his vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle will deny that the ads are racist, and will accuse Democrats of trying to use racism to stir up controversy (see October 1988). Failure to Respond - The Dukakis campaign will make what many political observers later characterize as a major political blunder: it refuses to answer the ads or dispute their content until almost the last days of the campaign, hoping that viewers would instead conclude that the ads are unfair without the Dukakis campaign’s involvement. The ads will be hugely successful in securing the election for Bush (see September-November 1988). [Museum of the Moving Image, 2008]

The “Willie Horton” ad campaign, a pair of ads launched by an “independent” organization on behalf of the Bush re-election campaign and by the Bush campaign itself (see June-September 1988 and September 21 - October 4, 1988), is considered an immediate success by veteran political observers, in spite of what many call its overtly racist appeal. Because the first ad, “Weekend Pass,” was the product of an ostensibly independent organization, the Bush campaign is able to keep a distance between itself and the ad. In the last weeks of the campaign, some polls show that voters blame President Bush and Democrat Michael Dukakis almost equally for the negative tone of the campaign. While the ads only ran a relatively small number of times, news networks run the ads repeatedly, often adding their own analysis while the images of the ads run in the background. According to InsidePolitics, only once does any journalist challenge the “deceptive information from Bush’s crime ads.… By amplifying Bush’s claims, news reporters gave the ads even greater legitimacy than otherwise would have appeared. News accounts quoted election experts who noted that Bush’s tactics were effective and that Dukakis’ failure to respond was disastrous. Because these assessments appeared in the high credibility framework of news broadcasts, they came across as more believable than had they been aired only as paid advertisements.” The “Weekend Pass” and “Revolving Door” ads have a palpable effect on the electorate, energizing voters who cite “law and order” as one of their major concerns for the nation, and driving many of them towards voting for Bush. Less discussed but equally powerful is the racial effect of the ads. Polls show that many white voters feel fearful because of the ads, and feel that Bush, not Dukakis, will make them safer from crime. InsidePolitics notes that the Bush campaign “had picked the perfect racial crime, that of a black felon raping a white woman.” Later research will show that many viewers saw the Horton case as more about race than crime; many subjects exposed to news broadcasts about the Horton case responded in racial terms, with studies finding that the ads “mobilized whites’ racial prejudice, not their worries about crime.” InsidePolitics will write: “Viewers became much more likely to feel negatively about blacks in general after having heard the details of the case. It was an attack strategy that worked well on several different levels for Republicans.” [Inside Politics (.org), 1999; University of Virginia, Introduction to American Politics, 11/18/2009] After the election, a New York Times voter poll will rate the “Revolving Door” ad as the single most influential ad of the campaign. The ad was particularly effective among white women, many of whom said that after watching it during the campaign, they began to view Bush as “stronger on crime” and as the candidate who would keep them “safer.” In 1999, InsidePolitics will write that voters often conflated the two ads, and it is unclear from poll responses whether they differentiated between the independently produced ad and the Bush campaign ad. InsidePolitics also notes the powerful impact of the Horton ad’s clear reference to rape. Dukakis’s campaign manager Susan Estrich will say: “The symbolism was very powerful… you can’t find a stronger metaphor, intended or not, for racial hatred in this country than a black man raping a white woman.… I talked to people afterward.… Women said they couldn’t help it, but it scared the living daylights out of them.” [Inside Politics (.org), 1999]

The “Willie Horton” (a.k.a. “Weekend Pass”) campaign ad, produced by an “independent” political organization on behalf of the Bush re-election campaign (see June-September 1988 and September 21 - October 4, 1988), and the Bush campaign’s accompanying ad, “Revolving Door,” draw accusations from the Democratic challenger, Michael Dukakis, that they are racist in their appeals. President Bush denies the accusations that race has anything to do with the ads, or even that racism exists. He calls the Dukakis accusations “some desperation kind of move,” and says: “There isn’t any racism. It’s absolutely ridiculous.” Dukakis is leveling these accusations, Bush says, because he “is weak on crime and defense and that’s the inescapable truth.” Bush accuses Dukakis of lying about his record, and accuses the Democrat of both racist and sexist behavior, though he gives no details or evidence. Bush’s vice-presidential candidate, Dan Quayle, agrees, and accuses the Dukakis campaign of behaving in a racist manner, saying: “It’s totally absurd and ridiculous. I think it shows just how desperate they really are, to start fanning the flames of racism in this country.” Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has accused the Bush campaign of trying to incite racial fears through the Horton ad, and Dukakis’s vice-presidential candidate, Lloyd Bentsen, says there seems to be “a racial element” in the Bush campaign’s strategy. In contrast to Bush’s denials, Bush media adviser Roger Ailes jokes with reporters about the ads, saying that the campaign’s only question about the Horton ad was whether to portray Horton “with a knife in his hand or without it,” and accuses Dukakis’s campaign of spreading racism about Hispanics in its own ads. Bush states that he is “fully behind” both the “Weekend Pass” and “Revolving Door” ads. [New York Times, 10/25/1988]

Two Democratic organizations in Ohio file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in the matter of the now-infamous “Willie Horton” ads used to great effect by the Bush re-election campaign (see June-September 1988 and September 21 - October 4, 1988). The complaint alleges that the ostensibly independent political organization that created and financed the first ad, the National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC), violated the law on independent expenditures (see May 1990 and After). The complaint uncovers numerous connections between NSPAC and the Bush campaign. However, the FEC refuses to charge the Bush campaign with campaign finance violations. [Inside Politics (.org), 1999]

Lawyer and ordained minister Fred Phelps, the leader of the virulently anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas (see November 27, 1955 and After), runs for governor of Kansas as a Democrat. He disseminates flyers attacking other gubernatorial candidates, as well as other state politicians, in what the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) will call “unusually personal terms.” He loses in the primary, winning 6.7 percent of the votes cast. [Southern Poverty Law Center, 4/2001]

The Ohio Democratic party and a group called Black Elected Democrats of Ohio file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over the infamous “Willie Horton” campaign ad of 1988 (see September 21 - October 4, 1988), claiming that the “outside” organization that released the ad, the National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC), violated the law on independent expenditures, and that NSPAC functioned as an arm of the 1988 Bush presidential campaign. According to the complaint, it was legal for NSPAC to expend funds criticizing Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and supporting President Bush’s election only if the expenditures were independent and uncoordinated between the two organizations. Any spending that was made “in cooperation, consultation, or concert, with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate, his authorized political committees, or their agents,” represented an illegal “in-kind contribution” in excess of federal contribution limits. The FEC conducts an investigation into the relationship between NSPAC and the Bush campaign. The investigation uncovers several ties between the two organizations. For example, Larry McCarthy, the NSPAC media consultant who, as a top marketing expert for the NSPAC’s “Americans for Bush” organization, created the Horton ad, worked for top Bush campaign adviser Roger Ailes; McCarthy was a former senior vice president of Ailes Communications, Inc. (ACI), which functioned as the main media consulting firm for the Bush campaign. McCarthy tells investigators he worked at ACI until January 1987, but continued to work with ACI on “a contractual basis” until December 1987, when he began working as Senator Robert Dole (R-KS)‘s media consultant. McCarthy admits to having a number of contacts with Ailes during the Bush-Dukakis campaign, but says some of them were “of a passing social nature,” such as “running into one another in restaurants or at airports.” He denies discussing “anything relative to the Bush presidential campaign, NSPAC, or political matters.” McCarthy’s story is contradicted by Ailes, who tells the FEC that he had talked to McCarthy twice about opportunities to work for the Bush campaign, opportunities Ailes says McCarthy lost by working for NSPAC. The FEC also discovers that another former ACI employee, Jesse Raiford of Raiford Communications, worked on the Horton ad, and while doing so “simultaneously received compensation from NSPAC and the Bush campaign.” Raiford also “expended NSPAC funds for the production of the Willie Horton ad.” Though there is clear evidence of illegal connections and complicity between the Bush campaign and NSPAC, the FEC’s Board of Commissioners deadlock 3-3 on voting whether to bring formal charges against the two organizations. The swing vote, commissioner Thomas Josefiak, says the explanations from Ailes and McCarthy about their lack of substantive contacts during the campaign “were plausible and reasonably consistent.” Josefiak says both were guilty of “bad judgment” and may have acted “foolish[ly],” but did nothing warranting legal action. The FEC also determines that Raiford only “performed technical tasks” for the two organizations, “and played no role in any substantive or strategic decisions made by either organization.” The commissioners conclude that neither organization violated campaign finance law. [Inside Politics (.org), 1999]

GOPAC logo. [Source: Mullings (.com)]A New York Times editorial derides a recent effort by a conservative political action committee to label political opponents with slanderous epithets. According to the editorial, GOPAC, the GOP Political Action Committee chaired by Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA), has issued a glossary mailed to Republican state legislative candidates urging them to use the following words to characterize their Democratic opponents: “sick,” “traitors,” “bizarre,” “self-serving,” “shallow,” “corrupt,” “pathetic,” and “shame.” GOPAC later “regretted” including the word “traitors” in that list of characterizations, the editorial reports, but has continued to back the use of the other epithets. The glossary is part of a pamphlet entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” and features a letter from Gingrich advising the candidates to step up the personal invective against their opponents because, he writes, vilification works. The Times writes: “Mr. Gingrich’s injunction represents the worst of American political discourse, which reached a low during the dispiriting presidential campaign of 1988 (see September 21 - October 4, 1988). Then, more than ever before, negative argument displaced reasoned discussion about how a nation might best be governed. The sound bite reigned. Attack commercials flourished. The signs this year aren’t any better. Evidence that negative campaigning can come back to sink the sender has had little impact. The races for governor in California and Texas have already seen the same slash and burn. No doubt the proceedings will grow more rabid still as November nears. Negative discourse serves democracy poorly. The temptation to avoid serious debate is already great. It increases as the stakes soar and slander becomes a rewarding, easy option. The issues of the day go untended. The whole affair takes on the character of the gladiator’s art. The GOPAC glossary may herald a descent into even lower levels of discourse. It comes blessed by a politician of some influence—the Republican whip in the House—and it is intended for candidates on the state level, many of them presumably running for the first time. Even though Mr. Gingrich himself may not have seen the list before it was mailed, this is a disturbing document. The nakedness of the GOPAC offering also makes it useful. There must be limits to the negative politics that voters will bear; the bald appeal to invective will certainly probe those limits. For now, it should be said that some adjectives in the glossary aptly describe the glossary itself: shallow, sensationalist, and, yes, shame(ful).” [New York Times, 9/20/1990; Propaganda Critic, 9/29/2002; Propaganda Critic, 9/29/2002] Later in the year, the pamphlet will win the Doublespeak Award from the National Conference of Teachers of English. [Propaganda Critic, 9/29/2002] Gingrich and GOPAC will expand upon the original pamphlet in 1995, after Gingrich becomes speaker of the House (see 1995).

Lawyer and ordained minister Fred Phelps, the leader of the virulently anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas (see November 27, 1955 and After), runs for the US Senate. Though he calls his opponent a “bull dike” (a missppelled accusation that his opponent is a lesbian), Phelps wins almost 31 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. [Southern Poverty Law Center, 4/2001] Phelps ran for governor of Kansas in 1990, and won less than seven percent of the Democratic primary vote (see 1990).

During the Republican National Convention, Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Rich Bond, in speaking about Democrats, says that “we are America, they are not America.” [Hunt, 9/1/2009, pp. 21]

On the eve of the election victory by presidential candidate Bill Clinton (D-AR), the Wall Street Journal publishes an op-ed titled “Dracula Liberalism,” which sardonically portrays liberals as vampires and Clinton as their prey. “The Clinton campaign, if you choose to believe, has driven a stake through the heart of American liberalism,” it writes. But the “dead” liberals may yet rise: “Like [famed actor] Bela Lugosi, the liberals possess great, destructive strength. They have the power of hypnosis.… (Has anyone checked the necks recently of [Supreme Court] Justices [David] Souter and [Anthony] Kennedy?)” If Clinton wins the presidency, the Journal writes, “the liberal undead would produce a great many fitful pre-dawn hours for a young President Clinton.… [I]f Bill Clinton wins, don’t bother to fax your congratulations to the White House. Send cloves of garlic instead.” [Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 61] Editorialist Otis Pike will write two days later that the Journal editorial concluded “what has seemed a daily barrage predicting a dreadful fate for the nation under a Clinton presidency,” even though the Journal’s own reporters were simultaneously running stories with headlines such as “Post-Election Investment Environment Is Seen as Little Changed by Who Wins.” [Newhouse News Service, 11/4/1992]

Sarah Palin during her tenure on Wasilla’s City Council. [Source: Sarah Palin Truth Squad (.com)]Wasilla, Alaska, City Council member Sarah Palin, a 32-year-old former sportscaster and current housewife, challenges three-term incumbent John C. Stein for mayor. Wasilla is a small town of less than 5,000 residents; Palin is popular among residents for her success in beauty pageants and for her history as a point guard on the 1982 Wasilla High School state basketball championship team. Before the Palin campaign, mayoral elections have focused relentlessly on local issues, such as paving dirt roads and putting in sewers. Personal campaigning revolved around who went hunting with who. [Anchorage Daily News, 10/23/2006; New York Times, 9/2/2008; Anchorage Daily News, 9/2/2008] Instead, Palin, guided by advisers such as Mark Chryson of the Alaskan Independent Party (AIP—see October 10, 2008), runs an unusually negative campaign against Stein. Her campaign slogan is “Positively Sarah.” Palin emphasizes her stance against abortion, her membership in the National Rifle Association (NRA), and her church work. She runs as an outsider against what she calls an “old boy network” that has controlled Wasilla’s government long enough. She vows to replace “stale leadership” and a “tax-and-spend” mentality with “fresh ideas and energy,” and, in campaign literature, complains that citizens asking city leaders for help routinely encounter “complacency, inaction, and even total disregard.” The Alaska Republican Party runs advertisements on Palin’s behalf, a first in Wasilla politics as Alaska municipal politics are officially nonpartisan. Palin also mounts a stinging negative campaign against Stein, including insinuations that he, a Lutheran, is a secret Jew. “Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff and I was like, ‘Whoa,’” Stein will later recall. “But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits, and the religious born-again thing. I’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’” Of the Jewish campaign theme, Stein will recall: “I thought: ‘Holy cow, what’s happening here? Does that mean she thinks I’m Jewish or Islamic?‘… The point was that she was a born-again Christian.” Stein, who is pro-choice, remembers a “national anti-abortion outfit sen[ding] little pink cards to voters in Wasilla endorsing her.” Victoria Naegele, the managing editor of the local Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman newspaper and herself a conservative Christian, will later recall: “[Stein] figured he was just going to run your average, friendly small-town race. But it turned into something much different than that.… I just thought, ‘That’s ridiculous, she should concentrate on roads, not abortion.’” Palin wins with 638 votes, a 58 percent majority. A local TV station calls her Wasilla’s “first Christian mayor,” though Stein is a Christian as well. [Anchorage Daily News, 10/23/2006; New York Times, 9/2/2008; Time, 9/2/2008; Seattle Times, 9/7/2008; Washington Post, 9/14/2008] Palin has a tumultuous first term as mayor (see Late 1996 - 1999).

Sarah Palin, taking the oath of office as mayor, 1997. [Source: New York Times]Wasilla, Alaska, City Council member Sarah Palin becomes Mayor of Wasilla after running a groundbreakingly negative political campaign (see Mid and Late 1996). In her term, she focuses on town development and personal politics. Palin supporters will say that she helps Wasilla develop from a small backwater into a fast-growing suburb, almost doubling its population during her term and bringing in large “box stores” such as Target. Critics will say that she leads the overdevelopment and exploitation of a town that was largely homesteaded farmland before her arrival. Palin weathers a brief attempt at a recall, in part because of town leaders’ fears of retaliation: She quickly becomes known for using her position for exacting revenge against her personal and political enemies. Council member Anne Kilkenny, a Democrat, will later remember Palin’s efforts to get books banned from the Wasilla library. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Kilkenny will recall. Town librarian Mary Ellen Emmons, later described by former mayor John C. Stein as “aghast” at Palin’s requests, resists Palin’s efforts at what Kilkenny will call “censorship,” and Palin promptly fires her. After residents protest, Palin relents and allows Emmons to retake the position, and drops her call to ban the library books; in late 1996, Palin tells a local reporter that her talk of banning books was merely “rhetorical.” Once in office, Palin demands that many of Stein’s supporters and appointees in city government resign, an unprecedented event in town history. She forces the public works director, city planner, museum director, and others to resign, and fires Police Chief Irl Stambaugh, who will lose a wrongful termination lawsuit in 2000. (Stambaugh will later say that part of the reason why Palin fires him is because she tells him “the NRA [National Rifle Association, a powerful Palin supporter] didn’t like me and that they wanted change.” Palin also informs Stambaugh that he “stared” at her during their meetings and attempted to be “physically intimidating.”) Palin packs city government with figures from the area Republican Party, sometimes including wives and relatives, and responds to a question about running city government without experienced government personnel by saying: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” She attempts to replace two council members with persons she knows, though the mayor does not have that legal power. She issues an edict forbidding city employees from talking to anyone in the press without her authorization. Victoria Naegele, the editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, will recall: “It was just things you don’t ever associate with a small town. It was like we were warped into real politics instead of just, ‘Do you like Joe or Mary for the job?’ It was a strange time and [the Frontiersman] came out very harshly against her.” Going against her stance on cutting taxes and restricting spending, Palin forces through a half-cent raise in the local sales tax to pay for a $15 million sports complex that hosts, among other local teams, a junior league hockey team, but the city will later have to pay more than $1.3 million to settle an ownership dispute over the site. And again going against her stated distaste for taking federal money, she makes frequent trips to Washington to lobby for federal funds for local rail projects and a mental health center, among other initiatives. In 1999, Palin will become president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors. [Anchorage Daily News, 10/23/2006; New York Times, 9/2/2008; Time, 9/2/2008; Seattle Times, 9/7/2008; Washington Post, 9/14/2008] Palin will use her second and final term as mayor as a springboard to higher office (see January 2000 - 2002).

The Senate launches an investigation into what a minority (Democratic) report calls “an audacious plan to pour millions of dollars in contributions into Republican campaigns nationwide without disclosing the amount or source” in order to evade campaign finance laws. A shell corporation, Triad Management, is found to have paid more than $3 million for attack ads in 26 House races and three Senate races. More than half of the advertising money came from an obscure nonprofit group, the Economic Education Trust. The Senate minority report finds that “the trust was financed in whole or in part by Charles and David Koch of Wichita, Kansas” (see August 30, 2010). Many in the investigation believe that the Koch brothers paid for the attack ads, most of which aired in states where Koch Industries does business. The brothers refuse to confirm or deny their involvement to reporters. In 1998, the Wall Street Journal will confirm that a consultant on the Kochs’ payroll had been involved in the scheme. Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity will describe the scandal as “historic,” explaining: “Triad was the first time a major corporation used a cutout (a front operation) in a threatening way. Koch Industries was the poster child of a company run amok.” [New Yorker, 8/30/2010]

The Senate learns that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) collected information on the political party affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states during extensive investigations into tax dodgers. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), a member of an appropriations subcommittee that oversees the IRS, calls the practice “an outrageous violation of the public trust.” The IRS blames the information collection on a third-party vendor who has been told to screen out the information, and claims that it never used the party information it did collect. IRS spokesman John Lipold says, “The bottom line is that we have never used this information. There are strict laws in place that forbid it.” Murray says she learned of the practice from the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). The IRS is part of the US Treasury Department. Colleen Kelly of the NTEU says that several IRS employees had complained to the NTEU about the collection of party identification, but that the IRS officials she informed about the practice claimed not to know anything about it. Deputy IRS Commissioner John Dalrymple told Kelly that the party identification information was automatically collected through a “database platform” supplied by an outside contractor that used voter registration rolls, among other information sources, to find tax dodgers. “This information is appropriately used to locate information on taxpayers whose accounts are delinquent,” Dalrymple claimed. But Murray and Kelly are skeptical. “This agency should not have that type of information,” Murray says. “No one should question whether they are being audited because of party affiliation.” Kelly worries that such improper information collection will continue, especially in light of the fact that the IRS will soon begin using private collection agencies to go after US citizens delinquent on their tax bills. “We think Congress should suspend IRS plans to use private collections agencies until these questions have been resolved,” Kelly says. Murray says that the twenty states in which the IRS collected party affiliation information were Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin. [Tacoma NewsTribune, 1/6/2006]

Ordering

Time period

Categories

Email Updates

Receive weekly email updates summarizing what contributors have added to the History Commons database

Donate

Developing and maintaining this site is very labor intensive. If you find it useful, please give us a hand and donate what you can.Donate Now

Volunteer

If you would like to help us with this effort, please contact us. We need help with programming (Java, JDO, mysql, and xml), design, networking, and publicity. If you want to contribute information to this site, click the register link at the top of the page, and start contributing.Contact Us